The existing moderator team would be sufficient. Post a set of rules, and enforce them. Then you don't need an army of moderators with some kind of bizarre military hierarchy.

Honestly, if all it takes to cause someone to throw a tantrum and 'leave the community' is a couple of trolls, no community that relies on such people is going to survive the internet.

Also, this is garbage: Ad hominem stuff should be moved, in my opinion, to Off Topic, and Off Topic shouldn't show up at all in the active posts sidebar. But 'attacking' people's work is too vague, especially when there are content-producing moderators. All it would really take is one hypersensitive moderator who made a crappy application to drive his or her forum into being a useless monoculture.

In short, he's not even complaining about malware linking or commercial spam. He's complaining about fake firmware threads and porn threads, which aren't against the rules, because there aren't any listed rules. Instead he's proposing a handful of people be able to delete stuff arbitrarily. That never ends well.

The only way andrewfblack's proposal would work is if the moderators were elected, so they had some incentive not to be drama queens, and there were an actual set of listed rules. I think you'd find that with nearly 25 moderators to elect, there won't be a large enough body of members to take interest in the elections, and I also think that the mods we have now would be able to do a better job if the forums had some hard-and-fast rules.